


Remembrance of the Time Lords

by Ellimac



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Time War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 06:22:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1090659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellimac/pseuds/Ellimac
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor's quest to find Gallifrey leads him to unexpected places, and forces him to confront a decision he hoped he would never have to think about again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remembrance of the Time Lords

“So,” Clara said, “where are we going?”

The Doctor flipped a switch. “Don’t know yet. Oooh, this is gonna be tricky.”

She followed him as he spun around the console. “Tricky how? You know they’re back, can’t you just trace them or something?”

“Aha! No, I can’t. That would have made the last 300 years much easier.” He flipped another switch, and Clara clung to the console as the TARDIS reacted, jolting them somewhere off-center. “No, we’re going to have to do this the hard way.”

“The hard way being?”

The Doctor slammed his palm down on a button and looked up at her, excitement kindling in his eyes. “The hard way,” he said, “being setting the scanner to find and scan every pocket dimension it can come up with, and when it finds a likely one, getting it to take us there. Thing is, the TARDIS doesn’t exactly like pocket dimensions. We’ve had a few bad experiences, bad bad bad. She almost got eaten one time, didn’t you, old girl?” He slapped the console, and it might have been Clara’s imagination, but she thought she saw the rotor shudder in response. “Anyway. The scanning bit’s easy. The finding bit’s more difficult. That little pocket dimension – oh, the entrance could be absolutely anywhere.”

“But you’ll find it, right?”

“Of course! Clara—” He took her shoulders and looked her directly in the eye. “I’m not the last anymore. Do you know what that means? I’m never giving up on this, even if it means giving up my last lives.”

She grinned uncertainly. “Good,” she said. “I think.”

He let her go and spun away again. “Very good indeed! Come on, Clara. We’re about to have the adventure of a lifetime. Of several, in fact!”

\--

The thing was, after the fact, he had never quite been able to justify it to himself. Yes, to be sure, there was evil to be wiped out; and yes, if he hadn’t done it, there was every possibility the war could have wiped out the rest of the universe. There was no doubt about it, the war had to be stopped. But there had been another solution, if he’d just looked hard enough, a solution that saved the innocents on Gallifrey, one that did not condemn his own race to death. He may have been a warrior at the time, but even so, it didn’t seem very _like_ him to wipe out an entire species when a better answer lurked just around the corner. He should have exhausted all other possibilities first, and at the time, perhaps he had felt that he had – but he had clearly been wrong. He couldn’t remember well enough what he had been thinking at the time to know why he hadn’t looked harder. Actually, the whole period was fuzzy; all he could remember was activating the Moment. But he knew _why_ his memory was off now, and he hadn’t done it in the end anyway, so what did it matter, really?

After the war, though, the guilt nearly ate him alive. He had remembered everything good about the planet, everything he had destroyed, all those lives his people would never get to live, friends and family he had known. He remembered the bad parts, too, but those were so irrelevant, so small compared to the idea that they could be alive. And when he couldn’t stand thinking about it anymore, he tried to forget. He forgot the number of children he had counted, forgot even that he had counted; he forgot the exact color of the sky, or tried to, and forgot the way the grass waved in the gentle wind outside. He tried to forget, and sometimes he was sure he had, but often found himself nostalgic, for the people on the planet that he’d liked, the things they had done for him, the nearly unspoiled beauty of the planet itself.

Because he still couldn’t figure out _why_ he’d done it. There were bad things, yes, there were awful things; there was Rassilon, the only thing to scare him enough to pick up a gun, in his tenth body, and the atrocities he had committed to keep the war going, to ensure that they would win, if anyone could be counted as winning then. But Rassilon was taken care of by now, surely, and the good must outweigh the bad. The Time Lords, he reasoned as he watched the scanner like a hawk after Clara had gone to bed, were not all bad. There were some that were very good, and many others that were just not bad. And even the very bad ones, well, they couldn’t be _that_ bad, and if they could, there were more than enough good or not-bad ones to take care of it, weren’t there?

He had been desperate, hopeless. But he had made the wrong decision, or at least he’d thought he made it.

A silly grin spread across his face as the scanner flashed through possible pocket universes and dismissed them at a rate too quick for the human eye to follow. That was the beauty of time travel, wasn’t it? Giving his future selves the opportunity to go back and fix it. And fix it he – they – had.

\--

The Doctor buzzed excitedly around the console, pressing buttons apparently at random. Clara watched him go, leaning back against the railing.

“Right,” he said, looking up at her for the first time in nearly an hour. “Here’s the plan. When we find it, it’ll be much easier for us to go in and bust it out from the inside—”

“Into the painting?” Clara said.

“Yes, into the painting. Well, it won’t _really_ be a painting. Not quite that simple. But yes, it’ll look like a painting, and inside will be Gallifrey. And from there, all we have to do is break the time lock.”

“Oh, is that all,” Clara said.

“Well, it’ll be a little easier because we’ll be coming in from the outside,” the Doctor said. “We’ll bring in a little bit of time with us. The all we’ll have to do is get it right to the center of the lock. The TARDIS can’t come in with us – too many TARDISes in the same place. But once we unlock the time lock, all we have to do is make sure it goes back to the right spot, and voila! Gallifrey restored.”

“Sounds simple enough,” Clara said.

“Of course,” the Doctor said, ignoring her as his attention turned back to the scanner, “we’ll have to _find_ it first… now that’s very odd.”

“What’s very odd?” Clara pushed away from the railing to look over his shoulder, but the data on the scanner didn’t make any sense to her. She waited several seconds before asking again, “What’s very odd?”

“Nothing,” the Doctor said, then, “Everything. These coordinates, they don’t make sense. It’s—”

“Impossible?”

“Yes. It—” The Doctor stopped and gave her a suspicious look, but she gave him an innocent smile, and he turned back to the scanner. “Well… what was I saying?”

“The coordinates are impossible,” Clara supplied.

“Right,” he said. “They’re impossible. Not the coordinates themselves, but there shouldn’t be anything there. Not an entrance to a pocket dimension – well, I suppose there _could_ be, but certainly not an entrance to a pocket dimension disguised as a painting. It doesn’t make sense.”

Clara looked at the scanner, trying and failing to make the digits make sense. “Well,” she said, “there’s only one way to find out what’s going on, isn’t there?”

“It could be dangerous,” the Doctor warned. “It could be a trap.”

“It could be your planet,” countered Clara.

“We might have to face anything.”

“You said there wasn’t supposed to be anything there.”

“There isn’t, but there might be. More Zygons,” he suggested. “Or Daleks. Or little green men from Mars. Only they’re not actually that little. Or green.”

She turned and gave him a look.

“Ice warriors,” he said.

“All right,” she said. “But we also might find your planet.”

The Doctor grimaced and turned back to the console, setting the coordinates in a distinctly less excited buzz. He still moved quickly, but Clara guessed it was more out of nerves than excitement now. She watched as he moved, as the time rotor shuddered to life, and listened as she heard the familiar sound of the TARDIS materializing.

The Doctor pressed several buttons on the scanner and squinted at it. “It’s not showing what’s out there,” he said. “But we’ve definitely landed.”

“Is there air?”

“Looks like, yes.”

“Good enough for me,” Clara said, and opened the door, peering out.

“It doesn’t look dangerous,” she said. “Just a bunch of paintings. They don’t all look like 3D paintings, either.”

She stepped out, and the Doctor came right after, looking around the TARDIS door indignantly, as if we were offended by the lack of danger. “Of course not,” he said. “Why would they be? Not here. I never said they would be.”

“No, but you said we might have to face anything,” Clara pointed out. “More Zygons, Daleks, little green men from Mars that aren’t actually that little and really aren’t that green, either. Your exact words.”

“That doesn’t sound like me at all.” The Doctor whipped out his sonic screwdriver and crossed to inspect the nearest painting, but before he could get very far, a voice sounded from somewhere down the corridor.

“Actually, Doctor,” it said, “it sounds exactly like you.”

Both Clara and the Doctor turned, though not too quickly for Clara to see the look of baffled disbelief on the Doctor’s face. “It can’t be.”

There was a man approaching them from the far end of the corridor, where he had, apparently, been lurking just around the corner. He was dressed in an impeccably-tailored suit and looked, Clara thought, very oddly familiar.

“I’m very much afraid it can,” the man said, stopping as he reached them. He gave Clara a deep nod. “You must be his latest traveling companion.”

“Clara,” she said.

He took her hand and kissed it. “Irving Braxiatel. Enchanté, my dear.”

“Oh, stop that,” the Doctor said, his sonic dropping to his side as Clara gave a slightly shy grin and held back a giggle. “There’s no one here you need to impress.”

“Oh, _thanks_ ,” Clara said, throwing him a look.

“Not even a hello?” Braxiatel said. “Come along, Doctor, surely you can spare the time of day for your older—”

“No,” the Doctor said over him.

Clara looked from the Doctor to Braxiatel, putting two and two together. “Is he your brother? I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“Neither did I,” the Doctor said crossly. “That is, I _did_. I thought you were dead. You’ve been not dead all this time and you never told me?”

“Would you really have been that much happier if I had?” Braxiatel said. “No, Doctor, seeing as neither of us is particularly keen on a touching family reunion, let’s get straight to the point.” His gaze focused in on the Doctor with an intensity that made Clara glad she wasn’t on the receiving end of it. “I know why you’re here.”

“You have it, then,” the Doctor said, putting his sonic away.

“Yes.”

There was something about Braxiatel’s tone that gave Clara the shivers, but she couldn’t quite place what it was. The Doctor didn’t seem to notice.

“And you have a way in,” the Doctor said.

“Yes.”

There was a pause. Clara looked between the two of them, the Doctor looking expectant and eager, Braxiatel looking… oh, she couldn’t place it. His face was unreadable.

“So,” the Doctor said finally, “where is it?”

“I’ll take you to it,” Braxiatel said, “as long as you’re sure you know what you’re doing.”

“What? Of course I know what I’m doing. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Oh, there’s a list that could go on all day.”

Clara barely managed to bite back a laugh. Fortunately, the Doctor’s focus was all on Braxiatel.

“Shut up,” he said. “I’m bringing back Gallifrey, that’s what I’m doing. Bringing back _our people_ , Braxiatel, can you get that through your head? It’s not just gonna be us anymore.”

“I see,” Braxiatel said. Clara watched him closely, to see if he gave any sign of how he felt. He didn’t, but she couldn’t help a nagging feeling that he wasn’t telling them everything. “Then, if you are so insistent – right this way.”

He turned and started walking back the way he had come. The Doctor paused long enough to waggle his eyebrows and grin at Clara, and started off after him.

As they walked, Braxiatel talked. “Leela, you’ll be glad to hear, is safely off-planet. Narvin, too, though I suspect that even if you knew him, you wouldn’t care. Romana…” He paused briefly, and his steps wavered slightly, but when he resumed speaking, his tone was exactly the same. “Too headstrong for me to convince. Besides, she was too prominent. People would have noticed if she had disappeared.”

“Don’t worry,” the Doctor said. “She’s fine. They stopped paying much attention to her once they got Rassilon back in power. Didn’t even put her in prison. Sometimes the high council even listened to her.”

“Wonderful news,” Braxiatel said dryly. “I trust you will be able to get her out safely at the _very_ least.”

“You know, I don’t think family members are supposed to be that rude to each other,” the Doctor said.

“And I think you have been spending far too much time around humans.” Braxiatel stopped and gestured down a short hallway that split off the one they were in. “There. Ladies first.”

Clara stepped forward and walked down the new corridor. At the end of it was a large painting, filling an entire wall, and in front of that was a strange-looking device. She looked at that briefly, but once it became clear that she would not be able to figure out how it worked, she turned her attention to the painting instead.

“It’s very… orange,” she said, as the Doctor and Braxiatel came up behind her.

“Yes, orange skies, red grass, orange fashion sense,” the Doctor said. A note of nostalgia entered his voice. “Those Prydonians, eh, Brax?”

“We are Prydonian,” Braxiatel reminded him.

“Right, right, but they did always have the most pompous fashion sense.”

“Pull the switch to get through,” Braxiatel said, ignoring him. “If you break the time lock, you will have a very limited amount of time to get the planet on course for the right coordinates. But of course you know that.”

“I know what I’m doing,” the Doctor said. He put his hand on the device’s lever and looked at Clara with a grin. “See you inside, Clara.”

He pulled the switch and flickered out of existence. Clara stared for a moment, then turned her attention to the painting, where indeed a small figure had materialized on the grassy plain. He was facing away from them, but she could tell it was him nonetheless. She grinned and reached for the lever, but before she could even touch it, Braxiatel’s hand settled on her shoulder.

She turned to him, and now she could see everything he had been holding back in front of the Doctor. He was tired, exhausted even, and so, so sad. He looked older than the universe itself, and his stare, straight into the painting, was full of a knowledge that was breaking his hearts.

“Wait,” he said, without looking at her. “It is… his task to complete.”

“I can help,” Clara said.

“No, you can’t. The Doctor made a mistake by bringing you here. One in a long, long line of mistakes.” He looked at her now, and she shivered under the weight of his gaze. “He cannot bring back Gallifrey.”

“Why not?”

“I imagine he will tell you, one day,” Braxiatel said, looking away. “I only hope he figures it out before it’s too late.”

\--

Gallifrey was as he remembered it: the sky orange, the sunset wavering, blinking as time reset around it, the Capitol majestic, despite its  current state of disrepair. Everything was torn by war, but that could be fixed, given time. And there were no people. Ah, well; he had expected that. He wasn’t on a battlefield, at least not an active one – he could tell by the grass still under his feet – and most of the higher-ups would probably be in the Capitol. Not to mention that was the most likely place to break the time lock.

“Right-o,” he said. “That way.” He extended his sonic screwdriver in the direction of the Capitol, for a audience of none. “Clara?” He turned, looking as far over his shoulder as he could manage, and finally just spun in a circle. Clara had not followed him through.

“ _Brax_ ,” he muttered under his breath, then raised his voice to the sky, as if Braxiatel would hear him any better like that. “She’s no safer with you than she would be in here.”

But there was nothing for it. If he left to get her back, getting back in would be much harder. Clara would just have to stay behind on this venture.

He retracted his sonic and put it away. The Capitol wasn’t too far away, but he had better get walking if he wanted to reach it.

The terrain was less forgiving than he remembered, especially as he approached the Capitol, but that made sense. After all, it was the Capitol that had been under the heaviest fire, especially after Arcadia fell.

A shiver went down his spine, but he ignored it. Now was not the time to think about that, especially not as he had to watch where he placed his feet, lest he slip and fall.

He was concentrating so much on not falling that he didn’t notice a figure descending one of the walkways toward him until he stumbled, and she caught him. He looked up to a familiar face.

“Romana!” He jumped up and wrapped his arms around her. Her own arms stayed stiff, trapped between them, and when he moved away, her face was neutral. “Romana, it’s me!”

“I know it’s you,” she said. “But it’s the _wrong_ you. Didn’t you just send a message to the high council? Three of you?”

“Yes,” the Doctor said. “Maybe. Yes, I did. Aren’t you on the high council? Not president again, are you?”

“No,” she said. “Not since Rassilon’s return, as you should _well_ know. But nor am I someone to be ignored. The message, Doctor. Is it true?”

His grin was met with a raised brow and crossed arms. “Ohh, yes. Yes, it is. No more destruction of Gallifrey. No more last of the Time Lords! I thought I didn’t have a choice, but I—”

Romana slapped him.

He put a hand to his face where she had hit, his mouth slightly open from the surprise of it. “Okay,” he said, “that’s not the reaction I was expecting.”

“Doctor,” Romana said, her tone dangerous and angry, “what you have done has had _catastrophic_ impacts on the timeline. By not destroying Gallifrey, do you realize what you have allowed to escape? What _could_ escape, and what _will_ , now that it has been given the chance? The Dalek forces on Gallifrey are far, far worse than the ones in the atmosphere, not to mention _our_ arsenal.”

The Doctor sputtered. “But – the innocents—”

“There are no more innocents on Gallifrey,” Romana snapped. “We couldn’t afford it. Doctor, you were _there_. You _know_ why you made the choice you did. You know why we all made our choices. Once Rassilon came into power again, we all knew that was the end of it.”

“But the children,” the Doctor protested.

“What children? The only new beings loomed during the war were soldiers. Child soldiers, if you must, but soldiers. All they know is battle, and all they _can_ know is battle. Is that what you wanted to save?”

The Doctor stared at her. It couldn’t be – he _remembered_ , he _knew_ there had been children. Surely there had been children. Surely… he could see their faces in his mind’s eye, but he had been on the front lines, he had been fighting with the rest of them. How could he have seen them? How could he have known how many there were unless he had cause to know, cause besides guilt?

The realization of what he had done writhed and wriggled its way through him. The children – himself had asked him about the children, and he had not known the number. But it wasn’t that he had forgotten. It was that there were no children to count. His younger self had known, had counted, but the number was preposterous, impossible.

There were no children on Gallifrey. He had tricked himself, or his guilt had. The innocents were the ones in the path of the war, the planets destroyed for the sake of one side winning the battle. And he had made it possible for that to happen again. Not only possible – if he brought back Gallifrey, it _would_ happen again. Even if he didn’t, the atrocities contained would find a way to escape.

“Oh, dear,” he said, the phrase not even coming close to encompassing the horror creeping up his spine.

“Oh, dear, indeed,” Romana said, her tone icy. “Undo it, Doctor.”

The Doctor snapped back to attention. “Undo it? No. No, I can’t do that, Romana. Please don’t ask me to.”

Romana’s fury filled the space between them. “I am not asking, I am _commanding_.”

“Please, Romana, I’ve already done it once,” the Doctor said. “Don’t make me do it again.”

For a second, it seemed as though she was going to slap him again. But she deflated, letting her shoulders drop, and instead reached out to put a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder.

“I know,” she said. “Believe me, Doctor, I know what it’s like to condemn our people to death. But,” she went on, looking him right in the eye, “I also know what it’s like to know there is no other choice. I would not ask it of you if I didn’t think – if I didn’t _know_ it had to be done.”

“I can’t,” he said, his voice strained, almost cracking. “I can’t do it.”

Romana’s look hardened again. “Very well, Doctor,” she said. “If you won’t do it, then I will.”

He froze. “Romana—”

“I wish it had not come to this,” she said, and the weariness in her tone made her sound a thousand years old at least. “I have held to my morals as long as I can, but I cannot sit by and watch the rest of the universe crumble knowing that I would have been able to stop it. I cannot sacrifice the universe for the sake of a corrupted species, even if they are my own.”

Her hand fell, and she turned to go. The Doctor started after her. “Romana.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind.”

“I’ll do it with you,” he said.

She stopped, and turned to look over her shoulder. “You will, will you?”

He swallowed. “I’d have done the same for the Daleks,” he said. Memories crowded into his mind, and he could hear a voice he had known once speak at the same time he did. “And who can tell the difference anymore?”

Romana’s smile was empty, nothing more than a gesture to show that she knew what he meant.

“It might be easier together,” the Doctor suggested.

“It might not,” she said. “Staring into the face of the person who ends it.”

“I’ve done that every day for the past 300 years,” the Doctor said. His attempt at a smile didn’t even make it to his face.

She glanced down briefly, then reached back for his hand. He took it.

“Let’s go, then,” she said. “And Doctor – I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” he said. “Will you make it out?”

“Oh, I suppose so. You did. But that was different.”

Here, at the end of everything, he felt he should have something more to say. But nothing came to his lips, and Romana fell silent, staring straight ahead as the two of them walked, together this time, to end the Time War for the second and final time.


End file.
